Why we play difficult games and what keeps us coming back.
A Cautionary Tale
As a young man I discovered the thrill of beating a real, living breathing person at a game. Beating a game by yourself is one thing – it feels good to accomplish something, solve puzzles, and beat bosses. But being able to beat another, thinking human being feels so much more satisfying. I could be better than someone at something. The Street Fighter series of games became one of my favorites. As an angsty teen, I relished in the opportunity to feel special, powerful, and in control of something. Life at home wasn’t exactly great -- I felt invisible, ignored, and inconsequential. I felt angry and afraid most of the time and had no idea what to do with those feelings. Being good at something helped me feel a little less lost, and a little less worthless, especially when I could show others that I wasn’t just good, I was better than they were.
I trained by playing against the computer on the highest difficulty. I learned how to read the other characters’ moves, block, and counter strike. I learned everyone’s special moves, ran through entire rosters of characters to learn every strategy and be able to read my opponents. Eventually, I got good enough that I could easily wade my way through the beginning stages at the highest difficulty.
One day, after what seemed like hours of retries, my patience was truly tested. That despicable, mask-wearing, fence-hopping Spaniard Vega, the sub-boss before M. Bison taunted me with every swipe of his claw. Even now the thought makes my blood boil. He was too fast for me. I couldn’t read the moves well enough to time my blocks, and my counterstrikes were always too slow. I smashed the retry button more times than I can remember, confident that this would be the time that I finally bested him, all the while the rage was building in my chest like a fire.
Finally, after what felt like a thousandth time, Vega landed the knockout blow on me and I just snapped. I stood up, anger surging through me, looking for somewhere, anywhere to go, and so I curled up my fist, gritted my teeth, and slammed white knuckles into the nearest thing I could find. Unfortunately for me, that thing just so happened to be a wall made of wood and plaster, and I didn’t exactly know how to throw a punch without pressing buttons on a plastic controller, either. I looked down in horror and disbelief as my anger turned to fear and saw the pinky bone on my right hand bowing upward beneath the skin. I would later learn that I had snapped it in half and would spend weeks with a brace on the hand to let the bone heal. To add insult to injury, the wall was completely undamaged.
All of that pain and anger over some pixels on a screen. Why?
“F*** this game!”
rage-quit
verb (informal - US) - angrily abandon an activity or pursuit that has become frustrating, especially the playing of a video game.
Anyone who lives with a gamer has heard streams of curses pierce the quiet of an otherwise serene atmosphere. Expletives, curses, and growls of frustration punctuated by sounds of frantic button presses, heavy keyboard clacks, and twisting plastic. My mother used to threaten to take my games away when she would hear my cries of anger emanating from the other room. She sensed correctly that I didn’t have a healthy relationship with losing at video games.
We play games for all kinds of reasons: escapism, fun, to admire beautiful art, to spend time with friends, to accomplish something, to pass the time, to zone out. While there are endless reasons to game, I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of players don’t play games in order to become infuriated. No one I know plays games so that they can shout red-faced and fuming at a glowing screen, or worse, at their friends. No one plays games to end up with a self-inflicted broken hand. But we still end up doing it, and we always come back. Why?
Gaming became such a big part of my identity as a young person. When I started to lose, I felt that my identity was being threatened. If I was no longer “good at Street Fighter” then what was I? The prospect of having to face the way that I thought about myself scared me more than breaking my own bones. This is a position in which I imagine I am far from alone.
The truth is, we’re not really mad at the game. When we curse the screen for giving us a bad roll, we are cursing the universe. We start to believe that the universe is out to get us. Every time an enemy scores a critical hit against us, every time we block a fraction of a second too late, every time we jump an inch short of grabbing onto that ledge, we are telling ourselves that we somehow deserved it. A profound sense of unfairness overtakes us and we just can’t stand it. “I’m good at this game! I’m smart! I should be winning,” we tell ourselves. We are channeling our anger into something we feel like we should be able to control and, in fact, that sense of control is what allows us to feel good when we’re doing well.
The Problem of Diminishing Returns
on tilt
prepositional phrase - a state of mental or emotional confusion or frustration in which a player adopts a less than optimal strategy, usually resulting in the player becoming over-aggressive
Difficulty in games isn’t a bad thing – lots of us play games because they’re challenging. That difficulty can take many forms. Difficulty can mean complexity. It can mean developing in-game skills and fast reaction times. It can mean patience, or strategy. It can mean unpredictability and the dreaded random number generator. Some of these have more potential to infuriate than others. ”Good” difficulty should make us feel good about overcoming those challenges.
The irony about being on tilt as a gamer is that our anger actually makes us play worse, making us even more angry. A lot of the games that we enjoy so much for their challenge are games that are inviting us to learn. How does the computer AI respond to you? What are the most optimal strategies? Which cards are worth having in your deck and which ones aren’t? Whenever we die in a game, the question we should be asking ourselves is “why did I die?” When we get angry at a game we are turning off the part of our brain that allows us to learn, so we keep failing and we keep getting angrier.
The times I have noticed I am most angry at a game and having the least amount of fun is when I realize that I am no longer learning anything. This is especially noticeable in games that I initially really enjoyed when I was first learning how to play them, like Darkest Dungeon and Dark Souls. When I have decided on a strategy that I think works, I move into an autopilot mode, so when that strategy fails to work, instead of being open to a new strategy, I just get angry and frustrated that it’s not working the way I wanted it to.
What often happens is that losing becomes the standard by which we measure our enjoyment. The more we play the more we know all the ways we can lose, so we begin to expect to lose at every turn. When the opponent draws the card they needed to remove our threat, we mutter an exasperated, “Of course they got that card! Why wouldn’t they?” Because we feel like the universe is against us, we expect that every card that turns over will be the one that loses us the game. In this context, all that winning does is set us back to neutral. It rarely makes us actually feel good anymore.
Can Losing be Fun?
Something I have found myself asking in light of all of these realizations is whether or not there is a way that losing can be fun. When we play games we usually want to win, but many modern rogue-likes are designed for the player to lose. A lot. Games like Darkest Dungeon, X-Com, Dark Souls, Hades, and even Hearthstone, are designed around the assumption that the player will die many, many times. They are also designed to give us the opportunity to learn from those losses and eventually do well. In spite of that bump in skill, most players know the incredible frustration that comes from missing a shot you had a 90% chance of making that ends up getting you killed.
But that’s the game, right? If the game were easy, it wouldn’t be fun. Back when I played Street Fighter and Soul Calibur like my life depended on it, I felt hungry for worthy opponents. Winning against a player that has no idea what they’re doing takes all the fun out of it. The hours and hours of time that were invested in developing that skill don’t mean anything if you can do it with one hand tied behind your back. We want to learn. We want to overcome difficult challenges so we can feel smart, capable, and skilled.
No matter how good a player is, anyone can lose. Even the best players in the world lose games—and that’s a good thing. If Saitama from One Punch Man has taught us anything, it’s that being too good at something is exceedingly boring and uninteresting. Challenging games provide the opportunity for the player to feel like they have actually accomplished something, overcome an obstacle, or outsmarted something. It makes us feel special, capable, and capacious.
If we are able to view losing as an opportunity to learn instead of some kind of betrayal or loss of control, then we may be able to feel less infuriated by that loss. We can take a moment, connect with the reasons why we started playing in the first place, and ask ourselves what there is to learn from what just happened. That is the essence of overcoming difficulty. If we are able to drop the storyline that the universe has it out for us, or that our skill at a game defines who we are, then losing just becomes another part of the game.
When I first started playing Hades I was in awe. Every new boon, every new enemy, every new boss was exciting and fun. I could not wait to see what the game would throw at me next. Dying and being sent back to the House of Hades to chat with all its denizens only made the game more compelling, and it made death seem less infuriating. But I lost. A lot. Just like I was meant to. It hurt even more to die when the boss had only a sliver of health remaining, but each loss made me stronger. I knew more, I had more resources to upgrade myself for the next run, and I started to get to know these characters. By the time I actually beat the final boss I was so elated. I had earned that win, by learning about the game because I was able to remain curious and excited about the challenged. Now, after almost 200 runs, I feel like an ingrate every time I get a boon and feel disappointed by the offerings because they are not optimal enough, but maybe that just means it’s time to move on.
Admittedly, this is all easier said than done. Sometimes, all there is to learn from a loss is that crit happens. These may still be opportunities for us to examine our relationship with the game and decide that not playing it is just the better option for us. Because very few things are worth a broken hand, or a heart attack, or straining relationships with loved ones, especially not the roll of a die.
Will Blackford is a writer and freelancer currently working out of Los Angeles. He served in the Peace Corps in Thailand for two years, and has previously lived in New York City and Portland, Oregon, where he studied political science. Deeply inspired by science fiction in games, books, and movies he aspires to write short stories and novels in the genre. An accomplished and skilled essayist, Will enjoys writing for relaxation, expression, and work. He is an avid gamer, hiker, traveller, and mindfulness practitioner.